At the recent #HIMSS12 in Las Vegas I walked around with a small, but noticeable, bluetooth “HatCam” clipped to my Fighting Illini ballcap. I even changed my Twitter avatar to show the HatCam. Tweeting one-minute (on average) interviews with hashtag #HIMSS12 (click it to search Twitter for related tweets), I had lots of fun. With other video (such as Meet the Bloggers: #HealthIT Edition) I even started a YouTube channel.

After tweeting a HatCam interview I’d sometimes check my Twitter stream to check that it posted. Didn’t work. Watching my Twitter stream felt like standing at the edge of Niagara Falls. I’d tweet. Check my tweet stream. Not there. Oh it was there. Just already hundreds of tweets ago. However, except for the increased volume #HIMSS10 Best Ever: Due in Large Part to Social Media is still a pretty accurate qualitative description. And regarding this year’s Meet the Bloggers at the Health Social Media Center, a lot of what was said two years ago (sometimes by the same people) still applies (at least to blogging): Meet the Bloggers Revisited: Can You Identify Who Said What?

I was going to wear the HatCam at the Society for Health Systems 2012 Healthcare Systems Improvement Conference (#SHS2012, where I talked about EHRs, BPM, and process mining) but I chickened out (first time attendee and all). When #HIMSS12 arrived and I saw all the bright and shiny mobile gadgets, I found my resolve and donned my own bright and shiny mobile gadget.

(By the way, regarding #SHS2012 and #HIMSS12, I tweeted both hashtags for couple days, figuring early bird #HIMSS12 folks were in town during the #SHS2012 conference. #HIMSS12 attendees are great at building #HealthIT systems but could use #SHS2012 process improvement techniques to systematically improve #HealthIT -mediated processes.)

I came to #HIMSS12 with two separate goals that unexpectedly (to me) melded together. (1) Have fun (especially with my HatCam). (2) Network with attendees about healthcare workflow and analytics.

I’d interview someone and tweet it. Then, they’d ask why I’m doing this (or I’d bring it up) and I’d whip out my business card (specifically the back of my business card, see below) and ask if I could deliver a 60 second pitch. No one refused and most seemed entertained in bemused sort of way. Since I’d many more conversations about what I was doing than actual doing, I got to (briefly) talk about process mining EHR and HIT data with lots of tolerant, then intrigued, #HIMSS12 attendees.

In between this keynote and the afternoon keynote, I planned to do a 1 minute video interview with Charles Webster, MD who had a hat cam. Well, the 1 minute video didn’t turn out quite like I thought it would go. I guess HIMSS finally caught up with me. Here’s the video :

Charles Webster has a really simple but powerful service called EHR Workflow. He allows someone to take some really simple to create data elements from an EHR and to create a nice looking map of where the bottlenecks in your EHR workflow exist. I encourage people to take a look at it and let me know what you think.

I hope you visit EMR and HIPAA because it’s one of my favorite blogs and, eventually, if you post or interact with John on Twitter, he is a most generous social media maven.

This dynamic, of giving something fun and potentially valuable (from a marketing perspective) in exchange for an opportunity to explain what I am passionate about, made my antenna quiver. I’ve been writing and presenting about EMR and EHR workflow management systems, business process management, process-aware information systems since the 2000 HIMSS in Dallas. More recently I’ve advocated process mining EHR event data (here, here, and especially here).

Back to the HatCam…

The HatCam is controlled by bluetooth from my Android (or iPhone) smartphone, which serves as a viewfinder (you’ll see it once in a while in the videos). I’ve a bunch of different lenses attaching to the HatCam, from zoom to fisheye to macro (for close ups, small print perhaps?). Anyhoo, here’s a fisheye tour of #HIMSS12, from education session and onto the exhibit floor.

Expand to full screen (lower right) for full fisheye effect!

My favorite “serious” interview was @pekharrison a statistician from Mercy who co-authored a wonderful poster about Process Mining of Clinical Workflows for Quality and Process Improvement. I’ve been interesting in process mining ever since I met its godfather, Prof. Wil van der Aalst, at MedInfo2004 in San Francisco. I follow, on Twitter, a bunch of BPM and process mining researchers in Europe and some of them follow me back (Hi!).

@MelSmithJones had just interviewed me! … in full HatCam regalia no less. Yep. HatCam was running. I’ll post the HatCam version of this interview later. (It has a “Being Chuck Webster” a la “Being John Malkovich” sort of feel.)

The Whole HatCam Etiquette Thing

If you listen to me talking to myself during the fisheye tour of #HIMSS12, I do address some issues I confronted. If the HeadCam is running and I bump into someone I know or turn into a vendor booth, I turn off the HatCam and point it upwards. (Reminds me of my father’s gun safety lessons. “Never point it at anyone unless you intend to use it!”.) I was afraid that folks might think walking around with a HatCam was obnoxious, but the opposite was true. Folks chased me to find out what I was doing and then dragged me back to their booth to interview someone. Sometimes I had to take it off because I couldn’t get to where I was going otherwise.

The HatCam was, and is, fun. I’d (and will) do it again.

By the way, might you be interested in a one-minute tweetable interview on a topic of your choice? If you were to do so, what would be a good question for me to ask you? That’s a fantastic question! Let’s do it!

I think you get the idea. I’m always looking for an angle. My HatCam was a fun way to introduce myself at #HIMSS12 to complete strangers and start conversations about BPM-style workflow automation, case management, and process mining.
P.S. By the way, there was substantial uptick in the marketing of BPM at #HIMSS12. Just take a look at the results below from searching Twitter for #HIMSS12 and #BPM. Against a backdrop of many thousands of #HIMSS12 tweets, these may not seem like a lot (and, of course I admit, lots are mine) but it’s still impressive when you think that the last time I attended HIMSS (#HIMSS10 in Atlanta) I didn’t see any at all besides mine.

I will go out on a limb and make a quantifiably testable prediction. The same search for #HIMSS13 and #BPM next year will return even more tweets. I can hardly wait!

What a creative use of social media!! Will you be doing this again at #HIMSS13? Please stop by out booth 1769 if you do because we would love to participate — and I would love to hear more on how this works for you!!
Best to you! Kelly